What's gambling cost? Advocates slam political inaction
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Sky News AU
2 hours ago
- Sky News AU
'Wake up call': Securty expert says Australians must take security more seriously following ASIO boss' espionage warning
Strategic Analysis Australia founder and Director Peter Jennings told Sky News host Steve Price that comments made by the boss of ASIO should be a wake-up call to all Australians on the threat foreign espionage poses. ASIO chief Mike Burgess at a conference in Adelaide revealed foreign espionage was costing the Australian economy $12.5 billion a year as he unveiled the inaugural cost of espionage report. Reacting on Sky News on Friday, Mr Jennings told host Steve Price that it was not surprising. 'This is industrial level espionage and intellectual property theft," he said. 'And of course it's being directed against Australia because we're a high technology country with very significant alliance relations with the United States and other developed economies, and it will be happening all the time.' Mr Jennings said that Australia needed to be taking steps to protect its military and economy from people who were looking to take advantage of the situation, adding that businesses needed to be aware of the risks they are facing. 'Mike Burgess touches on this in his speech as well, how naive Australians are to imagine that it couldn't possibly happen here or it wouldn't happen to my business,' he said. 'And Mike actually quotes Australian officials saying, oh, well, no one would be interested in going after my information. This is industrial level espionage and intellectual property theft' Mr Burgess on Thursday said "Many entities do not know their secrets have been stolen, or do not realise they've been stolen by espionage, or do not report the theft.' He also said that there were many countries that were committing this espionage. 'The obvious candidates are very active – I've previously named China, Russia and Iran – but many other countries are also targeting anyone and anything that could give them a strategic or tactical advantage, including sensitive but unclassified information.' Mr Burgess also said that he could not understand why some people were mentioning on social media that they carried a security clearance. "On just one professional networking site, the profiles of more than 35,000 Australians indicate they have access to sensitive and potentially classified information. Around 7,000 reference their work in the defence sector, including the specific project they are working on, the team they are working in, and the critical technologies they are working with," he said. "Close to 400 explicitly say they work on AUKUS, and the figure rises above 2,000 if you include broader references to 'submarines' and 'nuclear'.
West Australian
3 hours ago
- West Australian
New parliament, same old props for Anthony Albanese in ascendency
Midway through Question Time on Tuesday, Anthony Albanese received a yellow messenger envelope from which he extracted a slip of green plastic. Health Minister Mark Butler had already discreetly handed his own Medicare card to the Prime Minister minutes earlier. When Mr Albanese rose next, sure enough, he brandished the Medicare card that was never far from his hand during the election campaign. He was so wedded to the bit that, on the day he called the election, a staffer had to be dispatched to the Lodge to retrieve the green and gold card that had been forgotten on the early morning drive to visit the Governor-General. The reiteration of the familiar gesture during this first sitting of Parliament spoke to the Government's determination to focus attention on its delivery of election commitments. It wants to keep talking about what it's doing and sees the Opposition as irrelevant. The attitude shows as well in how Mr Albanese is approaching interacting with new Liberal leader Sussan Ley – or, rather, not interacting with her. He ignores her in the chamber and out of it. Even letters sent to his office go unanswered, where previously Peter Dutton's missives would at least be acknowledged. The Coalition meanwhile was determined to focus on the very topics Australians have just comprehensively shown they like Labor's approach to: health and energy. It didn't carry out any sustained test of brand new ministers Sam Rae (whose aged care portfolio has plenty that needs examining) or assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino, baffling people on both sides of politics. The toughest questions came from the crossbenchers, like Kate Chaney asking why just 5 per cent of the National Reconstruction Fund had been spent, or Helen Haines wondering what was happening for the nearly 90,000 older Australians waiting an extra four months for the home-care packages they urgently need. Ms Ley and her inner circle jettisoned their planned QT strategy on the fly the day Mr Albanese produced the Medicare card to instead hammer the Prime Minister on the cost of seeing a doctor. Despite the boosted bulk-billing incentives promised during the election not kicking in until November, they asked repeated questions about why it wasn't free now to see a doctor. Coalition frontbencher Melissa McIntosh brandished her own Medicare card along with a credit card during Monday's question time, earning her an admonishment from Speaker Milton Dick: 'The member will not use props!' Mr Albanese, too, received a light rap on the knuckles – 'I'm sure the Prime Minister will look after that card carefully and will continue with his answer' – but it didn't prevent his gleeful grandstanding. He delivered a lesson in the old adage of campaigning in poetry and governing in prose – and fine print. How many Australians today were using their credit card to see the GP? 'Too many is the answer, which is why we want 90 per cent by 2030 to just use this little card here, this piece of green and gold plastic,' Mr Albanese said. Energy Minister Chris Bowen could barely contain his enthusiasm at being given multiple opportunities to point out the Coalition's ongoing rift over net zero and climate policy. After the WA Liberals' State council used the weekend between the sitting weeks to call on the party to dump net zero, Mr Bowen linked Andrew Hastie's leadership ambitions with his enthusiastic support for the moves and hit job on local leader Basil Zempilas. 'The West Australian Liberal Party state council voted against net zero, the Leader of the Opposition in WA came out and disassociated himself from that which earned him an attack from the member for Canning,' Mr Bowen told Parliament. 'The member for Canning will undermine any leader of the opposition that he can find. He's taking a practice run in Perth for what he intends to do in Canberra, sometime in the next 12 months as we all know.' Ali France, who won Dickson from Mr Dutton, asked the first and last questions of the fortnight. 'How has the Albanese Labor Government been pursuing its agenda this fortnight? And how does this compare to other approaches in Parliament?' she inquired on Thursday. 'The Opposition have certainly been pursuing their own agenda – or, should I say, agendas, because there's more than one over there: fighting publicly over whether climate change is real and over whether they support net zero,' Mr Albanese said, continuing with a jibe about 'a split screen showing a split party'. The Prime Minister cautioned his caucus colleagues this week against hubris, telling them Labor had to maintain its humility and sense of service and purpose to keep in voters' good books. That hasn't stopped him and his trusty Leader of the House Tony Burke from rubbing their opponents' noses in the new way of doing things. This is compounded by the depth of the Government's frontbench and ranks of rising talent, in contrast to a decimated and divided Coalition. It's like a grand final team running on against an under-14s side, one longtime political observer put it. From slashing staff to slashing questions and committee leadership positions, they're taking advantage of Labor's numbers in both chambers and control of the ways of Parliament to hinder the Opposition's work in ways that will barely register with the public at large. Take the last-minute stunt on Thursday afternoon, where Labor did a switcheroo on the private members' business for Parliament's return at the end of this month, coming good on a threat to allow Nationals renegade Barnaby Joyce all the time in the world to debate his legislation to repeal net zero. Labor also backed the Greens to set up an examination of 'information integrity on climate change and energy', which might have escaped notice had the Greens not belled the cat on it being an inquiry into conservative campaign outfit Advance. The broad sense from Liberals willing to give her a chance is that Ms Ley's first parliamentary test went OK. She didn't make a splash, but she is giving voters a reason to look again at the party. The fights over net zero and soul-searching about the party's membership and women should have happened three years ago, Liberals from both sides of the party's broad church say. It might be leading to some pain now, but better now than on the eve of an election. Same goes for contributions like that of Longman MP Terry Young, who told Parliament the 'ridiculous practice' of quotas caused more problems than they solved. 'Men tend to be more drawn to vocations that involve maths and physical exertion like construction and trades, whereas women in the main tend to be drawn to careers that involve women and care and other people,' he said. The response from most Liberals asked about it was to put their head in their hands. It was a particularly stark contrast after a week of first speeches from Labor's two dozen new MPs, most of them women and many from diverse backgrounds. They told varied and often emotional stories of what had brought them to Parliament. But the one uniting strand throughout the speeches was their genuinely heartfelt thanks to Mr Albanese — far more so than is typical. Again and again the new MPs thanked him for believing in them when no one else did, for campaigning in their seat despite many writing it off, for asking them to run in the first place. 'Advice given to us when preparing our first speech was that it wouldn't be a bad career move to put in a 'thank you' to the Prime Minister,' Rowan Holzberger, who won the Queensland seat of Forde, said. 'Of course, I want to thank him for his performance during the campaign … But I really want to thank him for being like a big brother.' Once the excitement of the new dynamics of Parliament wears off and the Prime Minister falls back into old habits, there is potential for his bulging 123-member caucus to grow restless and unruly. The deep and personal loyalty to a leader on display during these speeches shows Mr Albanese will have as firm a grip on his party room as he does his Medicare card.
West Australian
4 hours ago
- West Australian
Australians want action on Gaza as rally verdict looms
More than 60 per cent of Australians want tougher government measures to stop Israel's military offensive in Gaza, a poll has found, as protesters await a court verdict to march across an iconic landmark. The NSW Supreme Court is due to hand down a decision on Saturday morning after a bid by NSW Police to halt thousands of anticipated protesters marching across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The demonstrations slated for Sunday aim to highlight what the United Nations has described as "worsening famine conditions" in Gaza. They have garnered support from activists nationwide, human rights and civil liberties groups as well as several MPs and public figures such as former Socceroo Craig Foster. In solidarity with their interstate peers, protesters in Melbourne are gearing up to rally through the city's CBD, aiming to reach the King Street Bridge. A last-minute application on Friday was also lodged to police by a pro-Israel fringe group for a counter-protest in the tunnel under Sydney Harbour, the court heard. Police confirmed to AAP the group withdrew the application soon after. Respondents to a YouGov poll published on Friday and commissioned by the Australian Alliance for Peace and Human Rights believed Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's condemnations of Israel had fallen short. "While the government has recently signed a statement calling for an immediate ceasefire, 61 per cent of Australians believe this is not enough," the alliance said. "(Australians) want to see concrete economic, diplomatic and legal measures implemented." The alliance called for economic sanctions and the end of any arms trade with Israel, which the federal government has repeatedly said it has not engaged in directly. The poll surveyed 1507 Australian voters in the last week of July, coinciding with a deteriorating starvation crisis and while diplomatic efforts from countries such as Canada have ramped up. Some 42 per cent of polled coalition voters supported stronger measures and more than two thirds of Labor voters, 68 per cent, are pushing their party to be bolder in placing pressure on Israel. An overwhelming number of Greens voters (91 per cent) wanted a more robust suite of measures as did 77 per cent of independent voters. The results highlighted how the nearly two-year long war on Gaza had resonated with Australians, YouGov director of public data Paul Smith said. "This poll shows there's clearly across the board support for the Australian government to be doing much more in response to the situation in Gaza," he told AAP. "Sixty-one per cent shows the depth of feeling Australians have towards this issue." More than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed including more than 17,000 children, according to local health authorities, with reports of dozens of people dead in recent weeks due to starvation. Israel's campaign began after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, reportedly killing 1200 people and taking 250 hostages.
